Professor Brian Diers is the Associate Head of the Department of Crop Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA. He received a B.Sc. degree in Agronomy from the University of Minnesota, USA in 1984. He obtained both his MSc. and PhD degrees in Plant Breeding and Cytogenetics in 1988 and 1991 respectively, from the Iowa State University, USA. Brian worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Department of Agronomy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. He became an Assistant Professor of Plant Breeding in 1992 at the Michigan State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, and then joined the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as a Professor of Plant Breeding at the Department of Crop Sciences in 1998.

Professor Brian Diers recently won the prestigious Excellence in Production Research Award from the United Soybean Board. Brian has devoted much of his career to soybean breeding and genetics research and to developing new soybean varieties that U.S. soybean farmers are using in their fields today.